Maiden Voyages (39 page)

from
THE CRUEL WAY

At dusk we slipped through the mat of dust that hung motionless above the road. Under our headlights, riders clothed in white seemed to be moving silently through smoke. Later we thought with excitement that we were overtaking majestically pacing elephants, their narrow and sloping hindquarters ending in a tiny tail. But they were only tall camels, their grey bulk made of two vertical sacks that built a massive ridge above their backs.

Akcha loomed splendidly out of the night, a pale angular citadel surrounded by low flat-roofed houses. Men were stretched on their
stringed charpoys; a group of brightly painted buses rested their tired bones, their bonnets touching. Once more we had that direct physical feeling of being in a remote corner of the world.

It was four in the morning, we had drunk our tea and wanted to start, hoping to reach Mazar-i-Sharif before the heat of noon. Since the road was now easy, we dismissed the escort who so cramped our style. But our man began to shout and soon we had many stalwart Afghans around us. Wearing a stylish
khalat
with brown stripes, an “old beard” who spoke excellent Russian tried to settle the controversy. He understood our point: we were giving a letter to our escort saying he was not to be blamed because we had left him behind. In such a heat, when the slightest pressure exasperated our skin, we could not long bear to be squeezed three in front, especially when the man’s dirty socks forced us to live with a handkerchief to our noses. (I do not know if all this was translated, but the sympathy of the crowd was certainly not with our horrible policeman.)

Meanwhile, because we did not want to lose face, the precious morning hours drifted away. The escort would only let us go if the mayor of Akcha ordered him. The interpreter went to the mayor. At last he returned accompanied by a new escort and a tray of figs for us! Defeated and impatient to start, we took the new man on board.

He was very tall and did not know how to keep his knees steady; he was prognathous and did not know how to keep his mouth shut. He had to keep it open anyhow, to be sick from the motion of the car: it was a change from his predecessor’s spitting of tobacco-juice. This was enough to spoil the quaint charm of travelling through what looked like a lunar country asphyxiated by too much dry heat. It was the nature of the soil and the lack of relief, no doubt, that were responsible for the deadly whiteness of the light. Moving with the wind, the car was unbearably hot.

The country was quite flat, sometimes furrowed by great irrigation channels which disturbed waters born high and far among the hills of central Afghanistan, in the cool lakes of the Band-i-Amir which we were to visit.

To give some respite to our policeman, we halted at a hut in
the desert where an Uzbek tending his samovar sold us some thirst-quenching
chai sabz
or green tea. The shade cast by the hut was all that could be found. A decent Afghan was sleeping there on the beaten earth, and before we could prevent it he was kicked awake and sent away by our man. It filled us with anger.

And that on the morning when we were approaching the ruins of Balkh, Bactres, the Mother of Cities, known to have been twenty miles in circumference, but dead now in this plain of the Oxus which, in the sixteenth century
B
.
C
. so they say, witnessed the first Aryan migration on its way to India by way of Herat, Kandahar and the Bolan pass south of Quetta. Balkh, where the religion of Zoroaster was for the first time adopted by a king, Balkh, where according to Marco Polo, Alexander the Great married the daughter of Darius, the town whose satrap Bessus had killed that Darius while he was escaping through Khorassan.

In the second century
B
.
C
. Chang Kien was at the head of a Chinese mission sent to the Yue-chi of Sogdiana (which is the same as Bactria); his journey seems to mark the beginning of the silk trade across Asia. The Yue-chi were Indo-Scythians who had recently invaded the country, until then a great outpost of Hellenism. “It is because these successors of Alexander the Great were so forceful and active that you are going to excavate Græco-Buddhist remains,” I said to Christina.

The white Huns were the next to invade Bactria in the fifth century
A
.
D
. In spite of their ravages, the country was still Buddhistic in style when two centuries later Hsuan Tsang the pilgrim arrived from China on his way to India “in search of wisdom”—Hsuan Tsang whose tracks I have crossed during three journeys to Central Asia and whose writings had so greatly helped me to appreciate what I saw. There were still, in Balkh, a hundred monasteries rich in relics of the Buddha when he arrived from Kunduz, the capital of the Western Turks who ruled over Afghan Turkestan or Tokharestan.

At Balkh, Hsuan Tsang admired “a magnificent plateau”: there must have been more water in the country then than there is nowadays. The change may be due to the fact, affirmed by geologists, that the crust of the earth is still rising in this part of the world.

A century later the priest of the celebrated fire-altar of Balkh was
converted to Islam and his example was followed by the landowners. In 1221 Balkh was laid waste by Genghis Khan. At first, the town that had sheltered Muhammad of Khwarezm had simply been occupied. But when Genghis Khan heard that the son of Muhammad had raised an army of seventy thousand men in Southern Afghanistan, he destroyed the town, marched to Bamian and later defeated the young man by the river Indus.

Fifty years later Marco Polo arrived at Balkh which he calls a large and magnificent city. “It was formerly more considerable but has sustained much injury from the Tartars who in their frequent attacks have partly demolished its buildings. It contained many palaces constructed of marble and spacious squares still visible, although in a ruinous state.”
^*

Timur in the fourteenth century was the next invader and his example was followed by the Uzbeks who conquered Herat in 1506. It was one of their descendants, Abdul Aziz, who fought Prince Aurangzeb of Delhi, then governor of Balkh. The Moghul prince was brave, dismounting at sunset to pray during the battle, and winning the admiration of both armies. “To fight such a man is to court ruin” cried Abdul Aziz, and suspended battle. It was the last attempt of the Moghuls to retain these far-away provinces.

We had no hope of emulating Renan and his
Prière sur l’Acropole
by meditating over the ruins of Balkh, comparing Asia with Europe: dreaming about the future of Paris, London or Berlin: our escort would have annoyed us, standing near, watching our movements, ready to forbid the use of our cameras as he had already done before. Photophobia was the latest affliction of Afghan officialdom—by contagion, probably, from Persia which tried to nip in the bud pictures that show her not yet entirely modern.

But we planned to outdo our gaping man.

Reaching the dead, bleached mounds of clay that had once been the ramparts of Balkh, Christina walked towards them, arming her camera and followed by the escort shouting
Mafi! Mafi!
Meanwhile, my gaze
was fixed on a tall monument with a shiny blue dome that stood a few hundred paces away at the entrance of the living town. Jumping back into the car, I drove to it as quickly as possible, leaving behind me a man on the verge of being split between us.

I had gained a few minutes during which I busied myself with my three cameras, taking coloured stills, black-and-white stills, and coloured “movie.” The sun shone harshly on the lofty ribbed dome and on the arched portal to which it was yoked. The dazzle of glazed tiles brought an unexpected touch of liveliness in a world that had fainted in the whiteness of the midday glare. Most of these tiles were too pale to please me, but that Green Mosque which stands by the side of the shrine of Khwaja Abdul Nasr Parsar stood proudly in the square and I liked the thick spiral minarets that framed the great portal.

Khwaja is a name given to a sect of holy men who once acquired sovereign power over the Khans of Turkestan and whose tombs are found all over Central Asia. This name is perhaps derived from
khojagian
, a teacher. They belonged to the darvish order of the Naqshbandis and they developed the “Power of the Will” through perfect concentration: “It is impossible to conflict with an
arif
or ‘knowing person’ possessed of the ‘Power of the Will,’ is written in their books. The ‘Tarikh-i-Rashidi’ informs us that ‘they were workers of miracles and healers of the sick and in these capacities obtained a hold over the minds of the mass of the people.’ ” The Naqshbandis (painters) were so called because their founder Naqshband “drew incomparable pictures of the Divine Science and painted figures of the Eternal Invention which are not imperceptible.”
^*

As soon as Christina joined me, shadowed by the policeman, we speeded toward Mazar-i-Sharif. To silence the expostulations of our man, I began to read aloud from the first booklet I happened on—Mr. Ford’s instructions to owners of his cars. But I soon stopped: it was too disquieting to read all we had done that we should not have done.

The deep pot-holes of the road were a menace to our springs; but we forgot them more or less, in the question: “Is it possible for our time
to produce such mystics as the Naqshbandis?” Born at Balkh, the most famous of them was Jalal-ud-din Rumi, founder of the darvish order of the Maulavis. Like his friend Shams-ud-Din of Tabriz known as the “Moving Spirit of the Order, the Sultan of the Mendicants, the Mystery of God on Earth, the Perfect in word and deed,” he lived at the beginning of the thirteenth century, the century during which Genghis Khan brought one world to an end by destroying all its great capitals—Balkh, Merv, Nishapur, Rey. Perhaps if a world-war—the modern equivalent to a Mongol invasion—was to destroy our present world, mystics would rise once more, eager to deal with facts more important and less sickening than the madness of men.

We travelled with a bookshelf fixed above the back of our seat. The poor books were shaken madly during all these days, but we rejoiced to be able to lay our hand on the right volume at the right moment. Rubbing against each other were Marco Polo, Pelliot, Evans-Wentz, Vivekananda, Maritain, Jung, a life of Alexander the Great, Grousset, the
Zend-Avesta
. I picked
The Darvishes
by John P. Brown and H. A. Rose, and read aloud a passage about Jalal-ud-din Rumi. “When on a roof with other youngsters, he was asked if it were possible to jump to the next house-top. He answers: ‘Woe to the human being who should try to do what cats and dogs do. If you feel yourself competent to do it, let us jump towards heaven,’ and then he sprang and was lost from their sight. The youths all cried out as he disappeared, but a moment later he returned, altered in complexion, changed in figure, and said that a legion of beings clothed in green had seized him and carried him in a circle upwards. ‘They showed me strange things of a celestial character and on your cries reaching us they lowered me down to the earth.’ ”

Later whenever he became absorbed in fervid love for Allah, he would rise from his seat and turn round; and on more than one occasion he began to recede upwards from the material world. Only by means of music could he be prevented from disappearing from among his devoted companions.

Years afterwards I came to know of lines of his that might have been written for Christina:

(1881-1958)

from
THE FABLED SHORE